Merveilleuse Melanie Laurent

Je vais bien, ne t’en fais pas

  Melanie as: Elise “Lili” Tellier
  Genre: Drama
  Director: Philippe Lioret
  Writers: Olivier Adam (novel), Philippe Lioret
  Released: 6 September 2006 (France)
  Status: On DVD
  Other Cast: Kad Merad, Isabelle Renauld, Julie Boisselier
  Runtime: 100min
  Rated: N/A

Back from a holiday in Spain, Lili, 19, find that Loic, her twin brother, has left the house following a row with their father. She disapproves of her parents’ apparently light attitude and is particularly shocked by her father’s reluctance to even talk about th event. Lili desperately waits for a phone call from Loic but her brother snows no sign of life. It is not long before Lili falls into a depression and her condition quickly deteriorates. She won’t eat anymore and is about to die when, at long last, a postcard written and send by Loic brings her back to life.

FILMING LOCATIONS

• Reims, Marne – France
• Rue d’Auerstaedt, Savigny-sur-Orge, Val-de-Narne – France
• Saint Aubin sur Mer, Calvados – France
• Vigneux, Val-de-Marne – France

MULTIMEDIA GOODIES

TRIVIA AND MOVIE FACTS

• The film is an adaptation of novel by the same name.
• Melanie Laurent received a Cesar nomination, and eventual win, from her outstanding performance of Lili.

SOUNDTRACK

“Une Jolie Fleur (dans une peau de vache)”
Lyrics and Music by George Brassens
Published by Ray-Ventura (1954)
Performed by Patrick Sebastien

“U Turn (Lili)”
Written and Performed by Aaron
Featuring Simon Buret

FEATURED REVIEWS

Warning: This Review Contains Spoilers
When nineteen-year-old Lili Tellier (the sweet, pretty Melanie Laurent) returns to her parents’ cookie-cutter suburban house after a summer studying in Barcelona she’s told that after a fight with their father Paul (Kad Merad) over his messy room her fraternal twin Loic has run off without explanation. We don’t know much about Loic other than that he is a talented musician-songwriter and a rock climber who abhors his dad’s drab conformist commuter-train life. Waiting in vain for a call back on her cell phone, Lili is so deeply troubled by the news of Loic’s disappearance that she eats nothing for the next eight or nine days. She collapses and is taken to a psychiatric hospital where she’s put to bed and she and her parents are told she can’t see anyone till she eats. This she refuses to do and her condition steadily worsens.

Protesting this regime, Lili’s father forces the doctor to let her see a letter that has come from Loic. She gets better and is released and letters keep coming. They show Loic is drifting from town to town, surviving on odd jobs and playing his guitar for money. Lili stays out of school and becomes a supermarket checkout person like fellow university student Lea (the radiant Aissa Ma•ga of Bamako) who became a good pal in Barcelona, and socializes with her and Lea’s meteorologist boyfriend Thomas (Julien Boisselier), who helped try to “spring” Lili during her psychiatric confinement. Loic’s letters are a mixed blessing. They give her a thread of hope but leave her in much doubt. Lili can’t move forward with her life until she has learned more about Loic and actually seen him. Is he homeless and desperate or just finding himself? Is there some deeper cause for his absence than a fight over a messy room Ð as one would think Ð and as the psychiatrist said there must have been a deeper cause for Lili’s depression than her brother’s disappearance? Melanie Laurent has to be the film’s center and its mirror. She must achieve balance, suffering and fading yet still somehow appearing to remain alive also to a future as yet undetermined. Isabelle Renauld as Isabelle, Lili’s mother, is harried yet always appealing. Paul (Kad Merad) is perhaps the most important character, a drab office worker, a shut-down dad, repressing his anger and self-pity, seemingly without emotion, but capable of more than it seemed. As Lili grows closer to the sensitive and pained looking Thomas, she learns that he and she grew up nearby and have similar backgrounds. The exotic and lovely Lea goes to Mozambique. Lili decides to move out of the house and Paul has new plans for himself and his wife.

Don’t Worry holds surprises in store for us. You might call it a mystery of family life. The film’s delicate accomplishment is in the way it reveals a secret world hidden in the heart of the commonplace, love behind indifference, a lust for adventure behind timidity. Things are not as they seem. Like a book Thomas presents to Lili, the story ends in a way that is partly sad and partly not.

To some extent the film stands or falls on its surprises because they are the necessary stepping-stones out of the drabness. The suburban setting is also central Ð identical houses that kill the soul highlight emotional ties that alone make life bearable. Lioret works in wide screen, with a bright, conventional palette. The depression happens in the light of day, where it’s most hopeless and inescapable. There is nothing chic or showy about this film; it avoids either the glamour of elegance or the glamour of destitution and places its events right at our doorsteps. We may feel a little manipulated in the withholding of key information till the end, but this is how we’re drawn into the characters’ claustrophobic world. The acting is fine and the changes are subtly modulated, and Don’t Worry succeeds in making us both feel and think.
Film Review By: Chris Knipp